


Loose Ends

by AceQueenKing, EruGhostCat



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Confronting Cerberus' Mistakes, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-12-19 17:11:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11902341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing, https://archiveofourown.org/users/EruGhostCat/pseuds/EruGhostCat
Summary: Miranda and Shepard go on one last mission before Shepard turns herself in, but the mission gets complicated when Miranda winds up finding some of Cerberus' past experiments - including some that made Project Lazarus possible.





	Loose Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Artwork is by the awesome **[EruGhostCat](http://archiveofourown.org/users/EruGhostCat/pseuds/EruGhostCat)** , who went above and beyond with this picture. It was tons of fun to try to write a short story that would fit it. 
> 
> All credit goes to **[spookykingdomstarlight](http://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight)** for helping me narrow down a plot that would work in 2,000 words for this awesome picture.

 Miranda woke early but made no move to wake Shepard. Her girlfriend looked strangely angelic in her sleep, red hair splayed across her pillow and soft lips just barely parted. A nice sight, she mused.

And about to become a criminally rare one.

The return trip to Earth, ostensibly the Normandy's last trip, had already been entered in the Normandy computer. Today, they were going on the second to last trip of the SSV Normandy and the ship, now well and truly empty, was disconcerting.

Miranda tried not to think of it; of what laid beyond this. Cerberus at her heels, Shepard in jail... She had no real hope of seeing any of this through but then again, at seventeen she'd had no real expectation of making her way far from her father's home. She would do as she had before. She would make due. Make her way.

And, eventuality, she'd stop feeling like her chest was crushed, like every breath could be her last.

Shepard began to stir beneath her. Miranda watched with a keen eye as Shepard stirred, committing each detail of her to memory.

Shepherd's brilliant green blue eyes flicked open and she turned to Miranda. "Hey," she said softly, in that uniquely Shepard way of saying everything by saying nothing.

Shepard tilted her hand forward to caress Miranda's cheek. Miranda leaned inward, hungrily hunting for a kiss. She was aware now, more than ever, that there would only be so much time for kisses.

As if on queue, Shepard 's omni alarm went off.

"It's time," Shepard said, and Miranda nodded, even if she wished Shepard was wrong. Shepard smiled at her, and though she could tell Shepard was putting on a brave front, she still caught the effort it was taking her to make it. "Come on. You're going to love Liara."

\- - -

Miranda had to admit that she didn't love T'Soni right away.

She didn't hate her; T'Soni didn't give her anything to hate, exactly. She was carefully blank; pleasant, but not passionate – calm. She was a far cry from the Asari she had met while hunting for Shepard’s remains so many years ago.

“Miranda, was it?” T’Soni asked. Shepard was more than slightly conspicuous, looking off toward the shoreline of the beach they'd arrived at to rendezvous with Miranda. She’d told Miranda that they needed to do a fetch task for T’Soni as a favor; Miranda had thought that it was a blatant excuse to try to keep from going to Earth right away (and Miranda did not voice any objection to this), but now that T’Soni was staring at her like she was prime meat in a butcher’s shop, it was clear what this was: a job interview.

Shepard raised an eyebrow as if to wordlessly ask _what do you think?_ Miranda leaned forward and grasped T’Soni’s hand strongly. “A pleasure to see you again, Dr. T'Soni,” she said.

Shepard smiled, the relief evident on her face, and Miranda smiled genuinely in return. Liara, too, had her mouth turn upward, though the Asari didn’t quite wear her emotions on her sleep as much as Shepard did. She wasn’t entirely sure she liked T’Soni yet, but Shepard trusted the asari, and Miranda was well aware of what protection a Shadow Broker could bring – even a nascent one, such as Liara.

“It should be an easy mission,” T’Soni said; “my contacts have said that this is an abandoned Cerberus’ lab that was investigating some Reaper tech. The staff was evacuated a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons.”

She was all business, and Miranda almost admired the way that she quickly brought up a map of the facility on her omni. Like Shepard, T’Soni could lead.

“So we get in, get out, and grab the data?” Miranda asked, noting the best entrance and exit – not that there were a lot of choices. They either went in through the roof, or snuck in through the front door, and Shepard was never someone who enjoyed sneaking around as much as she did getting up close and personal with a _nova_. “Sounds simple enough.”

“Provided you don’t have any compunctions about stealing from a former employer,” T’Soni said, her large eyes once again scrutinizing Miranda.

“Not from Cerberus,” Miranda said, then stalked towards the door. Shepard jogged to come up to her side, and she felt Tsoni’s eyes on her back the entire way into the facility.

***

The facility wasn’t quiet.

After T’Soni’s speech on how the crew had left, Miranda had expected it to be a quiet building, but it wasn’t; there were clanks and clangs and what sounded, disturbingly, like the _crunch_ of heavy steps on a thick carpet, all echoing around them.

It unnerved her, more than she was already unnerved. Miranda’s insides were still churning, each step of Shepard’s echoing at her side a reminder of how few hours, minutes, seconds she had left with Shepard. Time was precious and fleeting and they weren’t even alone.

T’soni seemed content to bring up the rear; she noted Liara’s information droid scanning around her, and this was a distraction also. With her nerves, she’d caught the blue glow out of the corner of her eyes and started to summon her biotics before realizing her mistake.

She walked uneasily through the facility. Shepard, for the most part, continued straight ahead, only pausing to hack into various sub-networks. Miranda should have been focusing her energy on doing the same, but dawdled, unwilling to do anything that led Shepard to leave her sooner than she needed to.

It was during her dawdling that she discovered the lab.

She caught blue out of the corner of her eye as she entered the room and assumed it to be Glyph. She leaned her head in the door, looking for Liara until she heard the heavy _stomp_ of the footprint of the glowing eyed creature; at that, she caught the bobbing head of – something – and screamed.

Shepard and Liara pushed ahead of her, each with guns drawn. Miranda flicked on the light switch, and Miranda gawped in horror as she saw what, exactly, they had wandered into.

It was a menagerie. That was the only word that would do it justice. What she had mistaken for a VI was, in fact, a gigantic beast, an odd sort of Dr. Moreau-esque creation that welded the body of a Krogan with the face of a Turian; in the corner, a Husk pounded upon the glass of its glass coffin, preserved for science. A wraith-like howl pierced the air, and Miranda turned, then saw an asari, contorted and modified beyond all belief enclosed in another glass coffin. Its stomach was extended and its limbs bone-like, and Miranda audibly gasped at it.

“Fuck Cerberus,” Shepard announced, succinctly summing up the situation.

There was a time when Miranda would have argued with her. That day was not today.

T’Soni flew into a biotic storm, quickly freezing the horrifying Krogan/Turian brute in the corner with a barrier. Miranda added to it, pouring her own sizable talents into keeping the experiments frozen. Shepard and wandered about the room, scanning documents, downloading data, and examining the frozen creatures.

“Hurry,” Miranda said through ground teeth. Shepard nodded, keeping a steady pace downloading several pages of data. This gave Miranda plenty of time to consider what, exactly had gone on here. Miranda debated pulling her gun and putting the creatures out of their misery but knew that she could not. Shepard would need them – and this site – for evidence. But she wanted nothing so much as to burn it, to burn all that she had done for Cerberus; she wondered how much of her own research had been shared with this cell, how much of her science had given birth to madness. 

Shepard gasped at a monitor and her face fell; “Everything OK?” she called out, her eyes focused on Shepard even as her biotics kept her hands occupied only toward the brute.

“Talk to you later,” Shepard said, which was code for no. Miranda felt the anxiety churn in her stomach at her answer but didn’t allow it to break her concentration.

Even so, she was awful glad when Shepard yelled “Floor it!” and all three of them ran like bats out of hell.

***

Liara kindly offered to let them stay over for a night in the Shadow Broker’s office, still operating on a ship hidden in a thunderstorm. Miranda was thankful; Shepard’s gasp in the lab had concerned her, as had her ashen expression that she’d held ever since. Plus, it was another night she'd have with Shepard, and such things were precious now.

“What’s going on?” Miranda asked, wrapping an arm around her girlfriend as soon as they were alone. Shepard leaned into her, those bright eyes staring deeply into own.

“Saw some stuff in the documents that I wanted to forget,” Shepard murmured. “’S bad enough I can’t stop thinking about being dead and then...not; knowing Cerberus used some of the techniques they used to stitch together a krogan and a turian with some reaper tech in reconstructing me? I know it’s not your fault but...” Shepard squirmed in her arms. “It’s creepy when I think about it, you know?”

“I didn’t know,” Miranda said, answering Shepard’s unanswered question. She squeezed Shepard’s shoulder as Shepard worked her way into lying on Miranda’s lap, hoping that she believed her. “Cerberus didn’t give us details on where any new tech came from.” Now, for the first time, she considered the implications of that; she had thought she was saving the universe for humanity.

Now she wondered what other horrors had been birthed by her research. 

“Can’t imagine why,” Shepard drawled, and Miranda felt her cheeks flush pink. She should have known many years earlier that Cerberus was not where she was meant to be, by virtue of their ethnics alone. It was worse now, knowing that she had worked so long on projects that had led to people suffering. Shepard had been so guarded when they had met, the yellow and black a mark against Miranda - and shouldn't she have known, then and there, where her loyalties should have lain? 

Still, she couldn't regret her time with Cerberus entirely. It had given her  _Shepard._

“What if I get like that?” Shepard asked quietly. Miranda stroked her hair, not knowing how to answer. She couldn’t guarantee that whatever had reaperized the animals in the lab wouldn’t one day take Shepard over too; she could only pray that it didn’t.

Sometimes, Miranda wondered whether the Illusive Man had played her all along.

“You won’t,” Miranda said. Shepard opened her mouth to argue, then closed it when Miranda pressed a finger to her mouth. “If anything _does_ pop up – I’ll take care of you.”

This seemed to satisfy Shepard, though both knew it was a promise Miranda was unlikely to fill; unlikely to even be _given_ an opportunity to fill. More likely than not, she’d be a scientist’s plaything, or she’d die of neglect in prison should such a situation happen – Miranda shivered at the thought of it, and decided that she would simply have to find a way to get to Shepard should any such thing happen.

“I’m scared,” Shepard whispered, “about what’s coming.”

Miranda didn’t ask her what she was referring to; the Reapers, the Alliance putting her under house arrest, T’Soni’s new information and the Illusive Man’s horrifying creatures; all could have been what she was referring to, or none of it.

“Me too,” she admitted, her mask dropping for the one person in the universe she could be herself around. “But we’ll find out way together. Even if we’re not - “

The word together stuck in her throat, but Shepard nodded. “You’ll have to keep fighting the fight on the Reapers, Miri. But lay low; let Liara cloak you with the Shadow Broker job.”

“I plan on taking it,” Miranda murmured, and Shepard nodded. “We’ll be ready, Shepard. We’ll be ready. I won’t let anyone stand in our way – Cerberus, Alliance, _nobody_.”

“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” Shepard cracked, her eyes falling closed. Miranda wondered for the first time just how much sleep Shepard had gotten last night; perhaps she was not the only one who was savoring their last few hours together.

“You couldn’t,” Miranda said, grabbing Shepard’s arm and pressing a kiss to it. “I re-built you, remember? I've seen the whole Shepard package, and none of you was bad.”

Shepard nodded and closed her eyes. They held hands the entire way back to the Shadow Broker’s ship, in companionable silence, Miranda’s eyes on Shepard all the way.

It was going to be a tough road, of that Miranda had no doubt.

She could only hope that both she and Shepard were left standing at the end of it.


End file.
